A brief report on progress in therapy for Alzheimer’s Disease has been published at the Journal of Alzheimer’s Research and Therapy. The authors summarise different strategies being pursued currently including those targetting the Amyloid-Beta peptide.
A longitudinal study (n=3494) examining the relationship between caffeine intake and subsequent dementia found that there was no significant association between caffeine intake and forms of dementia including Vascular and Alzheimer’s Dementia. There was found to be a significant difference between those in the lowest and highest quartiles of caffeine intake with those in the highest quartile having a lower number of dementia associated brain lesions at post-mortem.
In an article freely available here, researchers detail the post-mortem findings on the first person with Alzheimer’s Disease to undergo PET scan imaging with Pittsburgh B compound. The researchers found a strong correlation between the PET findings and the occurrence of plaques but not tangles at post-mortem. Thus this study lends support to the benefits of Pittsburgh B compound in the assessment process although there are limitations on the conclusions that can be drawn.
In a study including 214 subjects – young, middle-aged, older adults and people with Alzheimer’s Disease the latter group were differentiated by performance on a visual motion processing task in which randomly moving dots were presented in the visual field. It will be interesting to see the results of further studies in this area.
A recent paper in the Lancet Neurology reviews developments in behavioural variant Frontotemporal Dementia including a new classification scheme which is characterised by the likelihood that the disease is correct.
There is a write-up here of a study involving participants in their 20’s, 40’s and 60’s. The researchers found evidence that the older adult group were better at reappraising negative events positively but that the other two groups scored more highly on tasks that involved ‘detached appraisal’ in which events are viewed while dissociating feelings.
Mind Hacks has another interesting round-up of Spike Activity featuring links to a radio program on the influence of Freud on British Culture as well as a case-study on a person who was unable to experience fear after a lesion to the Amygdala.
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